A broad view of plant-pathogen interactions illustrating the fundamental reciprocal role pathogens and hosts play in shaping each other's ecology and evolution.

Understanding the symbiosis between plants and pathogenic microbes is at the core of effective disease management for crops and managed forests. At the same time, plant-pathogen interactions comprise a wonderfully diverse set of ecological relationships that are powerful and yet so commonplace that they often go unnoticed. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists are increasingly exploring the terrain of plant disease ecology, investigating topics such as how pathogens shape diversity in plant communities, how features of plant-microbe interactions including host range and mutualism/antagonism evolve, and how biological invasions, climate change, and other agents of global change can drive disease emergence. Traditional training in ecology and evolutionary biology seldom provides structured exposure to plant pathology or microbiology, and training in plant pathology rarely offers depth in the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary ecology or includes examples from complex wild ecosystems. This novel textbook seeks to unite the research communities of plant disease ecology and plant pathology by bridging this gap.

Parasites exhibit a range of life-history strategies that influence spatial and temporal disease dynamics, epidemiology development and, through this, the genetic diversity and spatial structure of their populations, and the evolutionary dynamics within populations. Parasites exhibit a range of life-history traits, including different life-cycle complexity, dispersal and survival strategies, transmission modes, and dispersal ability. These are important determinants of the frequency and predictability of interactions with host species. These determinants are also involved in the ability of parasites to adapt to varying ecological factors including changes in the abiotic environment, evolution of agrosystem characteristics, and direct or indirect competition with other co-occurrence parasites species. The aim of this Research Topic is to collect studies on plant pathogen life history traits and adaptation to environmental constraints.

This volume sits at the cross-roads of a number of areas of scientific interest that, in the past, have largely kept themselves separate - agriculture, forestry, population genetics, ecology, conservation biology, genomics and the protection of plant genetic resources. Yet these areas also have a lot of common interests and increasingly these independent lines of inquiry are tending to coalesce into a more comprehensive view of the complexity of plant-pathogen associations and their ecological and evolutionary dynamics. This interdisciplinary source provides a comprehensive overview of this changing situation by identifying the role of pathogens in shaping plant populations, species and communities, tackling the issue of the increasing importance of invasive and newly emerging diseases and giving broader recognition to the fundamental importance of the influence of space and time (as manifest in the metapopulation concept) in driving epidemiological and co-evolutionary trajectories.

Aboveground interactions between plants and organisms have served as a foundation of ecological and evolutionary theories. Accumulating evidence suggests that interactions that occur belowground can have immense influence on eco-evolutionary dynamics of plants. Despite the increasing awareness among scientists of the importance of belowground interactions for plant performance and community dynamics, they have received considerably less theoretical and empirical attention compared to aboveground interactions. In this eBook we aim to highlight the overlooked roles of belowground interactions and outline their myriad ecological roles, from affecting soil health through impacting plant interactions with above-ground fauna. This eBook with 18 articles and an Editorial includes conceptual contribution together with original research work. The chapters are exploring the roles of belowground biotic interactions, in the context of ecological processes both below- and above-ground.

Far from being passive elements in the landscape, plants have developed many sophisticated chemical and mechanical means of deterring organisms that seek to prey on them. This volume draws together research from ecology, evolution, agronomy, and plant pathology to produce an ecological genetics perspective on plant resistance in both natural and agricultural systems. By emphasizing the ecological and evolutionary basis of resistance, the book makes an important contribution to the study of how phytophages and plants coevolve. Plant Resistance to Herbivores and Pathogens not only reviews the literature pertaining to plant resistance from a number of traditionally separate fields but also examines significant questions that will drive future research. Among the topics explored are selection for resistance in plants and for virulence in phytophages; methods for studying natural variation in plant resistance; the factors that maintain intraspecific variation in resistance; and the ecological consequences of within-population genetic variation for herbivorous insects and fungal pathogens. "A comprehensive review of the theory and information on a large, rapidly growing, and important subject."—Douglas J. Futuyma, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Research on the interactions of plants and phytopathogenic fungi has become one of the most interesting and rapidly moving fields in the plant sciences, the findings of which have contributed tremendously to the development of new strategies of plant protection. This book offers insight into the state of present knowledge. Special emphasis is placed on recognition phenomena between plants and fungi, parasitization strategies employed by the phytopathogenic fungi, the action of phytotoxins, the compatibility of pathogens with host plants and the basic resistance of non-host plants as well as cultivar-specific resistance of host plants. Special attention is paid to the gene-for-gene hypothesis for the determination of race-specific resistance, its molecular models and to the nature of race non-specific resistance as well as the population dynamics of plants and the evolution of their basic resistance.